Tuesday, August 12, 2014

I've jibber jabbered here and there
about the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, the Mythical Wilderness sub-region
of the campaign that I have been slowly, slowly, slowly turning into
a mini-sandbox for public consumption.

Longtime readers will have probably
noticed that I have also spent a good chunk of time here on the blog
and on Google Plus raising criticisms of the excesses of the rpg
crowd-funding way and the commercialization of our hobby. As I gear
up for horror of horrors a modest Kickstarter in early September I
also gear up for not being a complete ass of a hypocrite.

So here's what you can expect as
counter-measures against douchery in the Kickstarter:

1. That when it goes live the
manuscript will be in a “pre-print” done state. It is currently
in its fifth round of aggressive editing and the two tireless
editors, Robert Parker and Anthony Picaro, have done the Lord's work
in whipping my lazy, indulgent 50-plus digest-sized pages of text
into some coherence. There will be no getting stuck in the
hard-to-maintain cycle of motivating, writing, playtesting--and
avoiding your collective wrath as a result.

2. A bottom $1 or 2 “test drive”
tier where you can get the artless PDF immediately (all tiers will
get this but I wanted to give folks something my cheap and picky self
would want.)

3. A lot of thought has gone into the
project not getting bogged down in the usual morass of crowdsourcing
delays (and excuses). Higher backer-tiers and stretch goals have been
kept modest with an eye on being able to be put together at a
reasonably quick pace. Importantly the print publication will be done
through RPG Now/RPG Drive-Thru's print-on-demand with an at-cost
coupon being sent to backers thus reducing the major delaying woes of
printing and fulfillment. (It also means that UK backers can get
domestic shipping rates.)

4. That a sizable chunk of the budget
is going to pay first the talented David Lewis Johnson (who has also played in the campaign) for gorgeous art and cartography. Another quarter-percentage chunk is
going to pay for the editing and layout (yay Mike Davison). While
KS's skimpy restrictions don't allow you to directly fund-raise most
if not all of what I take all the end of that pie will be going to
pay for the filing and legal costs of reviving Hydra, my hippy-ideal
game design cooperative, as a worker-owned company (more about that
later in the week).

The Golden Barge cover (adventurers likely to disappear)

But enough about the hand-wringing,
here are the fun things you can expect from the Dune:

A pointcrawl of the otherwordly
Dunes region. Beyond the big ticket adventure sites you will find
along the way include a Polevik-haunted rye field, a Zardoz
head-living hermit (that scraggly fellar above), bearling pilgrimage
site and other assorted madness.

Two separate “dungeon” sites,
the biomechanical, lost-in-time Golden Barge and the warring
demi-gods Glittering Tower, with enough detail and portability to be
slotted into an existing campaign (as can many of the adventure
nodes).

A subsystem for modeling the mythic
weirdness of the Dunes in the Chaos Index, a dynamic events
systems. Actions of the players in the sandbox will escalate or
deescalate the levels of events from blood-rain thunderstorms to an
aerial invasion of magictech bubble cars.

Four competing factions
operating inside the Dunes, plus guidelines for their mutual
interactions.

Unique, “unlockable” player
classes, spells and magic items compatible with Labyrinth Lord or
really any other oldish D&D game.

15 new and unique monsters, many
drawn from Slavic mythology (with a twist or three, naturally).

Some flipping great cover and
interior art by David.
Check out some of the early sketches.

Monday, August 11, 2014

“Going up that river was like
traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when
vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty
stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm,
thick, heavy, sluggish...It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

One of the enduring themes of
neo-oldish D&D in the past five years has been the notion of
dungeon as a “mythic underworld.” Philotomy the originator of
the phrase stated it quite succinctly: “a mega dungeon should have
a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it
is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not
apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken.”

Inexplicably the theme hasn't extended
itself as thoroughly to the ancient realm of the mythic: wilderness.
Projecting our dreams and ideas into the wilds is a timeless thing
that changes with our own times. It is nature as giver, supernatural
evil, challenge, peaceful refuge, antidote to civilized decadence or
whatever. The theme endures and deserves some gaming love as a motif
for adventure sites.

Of course in fantasy gaming almost all
wilderness is mythical in the sense that human civilization has a
weak hold and things monstrous or magical often live in their bounds.
But I'm talking here about the cranked up high version. The kind of
wilderness that is truly otherworldly, the enchanted wood, divine mountain, sacred grove or magic garden gone feral.

Mythical Wilderness is a major running
theme in the eponymous campaign. Where going into the wilds—crossing into the Weird--is going into a different physical reality.
Characters can feel an electric undercurrent as they pass out of the
human realm and can expect just about anything.

Not surprisingly as it comes straight
out of that broken line of reasoning and play, Mythical Wilderness
plays a huge role in the soon-to-be published mini-sandbox Slumbering
Ursine Dunes (now in its fifth editing iteration and being run again
on Google Plus if you'd like to come out and play).

The Dunes incorporates most of the
following laundry list: an internal ecology and weather climate
distinct from the surrounding “real world”, impossibly large
dunes; magical fields; mythical demi-god guardians, and a random "weird" events system, a chaos index, that dynamically changes the
sandbox with player actions.

Common Features

Internal Dynamics Trump Ecology. It
may have beasts going through the motions of such things as predation
or a climate cycle or the like or it may have nothing at all like
that (no mundane animals, nothing consumed/shat etc). The internal
logic and dynamics of the place trumps all and it is not beholden to
the regular rules of either the mundane natural world or human
civilization.

Unhooked from Time and Space.
Time is completely relative inside it and may have any number of
effects. It may work like the Faerie mounds or realms of Northwestern
European folklore with years passing in the outside world for a
matter of days inside. Or it may preserve residents of an ancient
past or border/open into another plane of existence altogether.

Inimical or Supernatural Terrain.
Trees may grow to fantasic
heights or widths. Whole forests of giant gnome red cap mushrooms may
bloom. Miniature mountain ranges rise, amnesia-producing rivers
spring or seas of lava spread. The terrain itself may even be
actively hostile to outsiders, twisted trees and vines may trip or
attack.

Bends Outside Magic. Spell
effects will often be different. Certain spells may be amplified,
dulled or neglected in effect. Certain areas may be magically fertile
or completely barren. Endless fun for the GM.

Layers of Mystery. Part
of the great fun of having this kind of funhouse wilderness is that
what

makes it all tick—the why and how of the whole thing-- is
often something wholly inexplicable at first. Like a great dungeon or
adventure site those layers get peeled away in exploration. Think of
the Island in Lost here.

Powerful, Semi-Divine Boss/Force.
Invariably the strange, weird,
mysterious and fantastical nature of the Mythic Wilderness is due to
a force or master. A terribly powerful being-- the Horned Master of
the Wild Hunt, Green Man, Faerie Queen, Demonic Tree-Spirit, Batshit
Archmage or what have you—that the PCs run
from/parlay/barter/fight.

Anything
else you think should make this list? War stories of your own
creations?